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Apr 30, 2024 Web Exclusive By Nicholas Russell

Annie Clark wants to play guitar. That much has been evident since her days at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in the early 2000s, since dropping out and touring with The Polyphonic Spree and, shortly after, with Sufjan Stevens. Striking out on her own during the indie-folk-lo-fi miasma of the mid-aughts, Clark’s 2007-released debut LP Marry Me, released under the moniker St. Vincent, melded choral refrains and the kind of soft-vocalized, earnest, twee turns of phrase fit for a coffee shop playlist featuring Regina Spektor and Andrew Bird. Still, beneath the striped scarf playfulness thrummed the kind of instrumental virtuosity and hard-edged riffing that comes from being classically trained and listening to Pantera. Marry Me foregrounded Clark’s melodic, flexible vocal range, with pretty and complex arrangements to lift it. But ever since 2009’s Actor, listeners have glimpsed the shredding rock god Clark so often turns into during her live performances. This is St. Vincent’s truest persona, no matter how radically changed the appearance between records, no matter how fastidiously considered the performative style between tours.

All Born Screaming, St. Vincent’s new album, does away with any consideration of a grand, overarching aesthetic narrative and puts the formidable musician at its center. Clark’s previous record, 2021’s Daddy’s Home, grounded its aural and physical costuming in a pastiche of 1970s New York, complete with heroin-chic make-up, Steely Dan-lite backing vocals, and a tortured paean to underground misfits à la Candy Darling. The results were mixed, an increasingly common phenomenon for St. Vincent ever since her 2014 self-titled album, which perfectly executed the deployment of idiosyncratic stage persona and conceptual musical experimentation she’s endeavored to refresh with each record. St. Vincent was also the last time Clark seemed so intent on crafting irresistible bangers.

Which would seem to make All Born Screaming a return to form, a course correction. Except audiences have never seen this version of St. Vincent before, backed by Dave Grohl and Josh Freese on thunderous drums, with Cate Le Bon on bass and vocals, Clark indulging in everything from Nine Inch Nails-adjacent industrial pop to beachy one-drop ska to guitar riffs that unexpectedly conjure both Soundgarden and Tool. Thematically, the lyrics on All Born Screaming revolve around romantic love found and lost, as on the simmering then bombastic “Reckless” and head-nodding sleaze of “Flea,” unbridled societal frustration on the cock rock-aping “Broken Man,” and Clark’s ever-present search for belonging as a queer woman and an artist, as on “So Many Planets” and “Sweetest Fruit.”

And yet, for the better, this version of St. Vincent comes without much in the way of a clever guise. All Born Screaming sounds like a grab bag of influences and sounds, a loose assortment for Clark to sift through and play with. Part of this stems from the fact that, for the first time in her career, Clark produced the album herself, ditching the sedate wash of synths favored by Jack Antonoff, who produced Daddy’s Home and 2017’s Masseduction. Every instrument shines clear across All Born Screaming’s 10 tracks, a jungle gym on and through which Clark croons, growls, and pleads before she ditches the vocals altogether and sets her sights back on the guitar. Especially within a landscape of overstuffed, overlong albums with muddy conceptual ambitions and lackluster instrumentation, All Born Screaming thrills for its directness, its momentum, and, crucially, its replayability. God rest St. Vincent. Long live Annie Clark. (www.ilovestvincent.com)

Author rating: 8/10